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  • Add to history, and not take from it (updated 17aug17)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 August 2017.]

    The Charlottesville clash is metastasizing across the country.  In these look-alike demonstrations, the Civil War and all that it entails has become the latest collision point of several ideological and political agendas.  For those able to handle historical nuances, our Civil War was not a civil war, but a War for Southern Independence, or more neutrally, the War Between the States.  In a real civil war, each side wants to wind up in control of the entire country.  But since time is short, we’ll call it a ‘Civil War’ in the sequel.

    That in 1865 the South, among its other objectives, wanted to perpetuate slavery is today enough to charge anyone, who wants to retain reminders of that bloody conflict, with a long list of additional social sins.  For example, to defend the continued acceptance of statuary, paintings, plaques, and other symbols that memorialize that conflict in the South, is to be cast as a white supremacist who longs for the day when the blacks can again be enslaved.  And the promotion of American nationalism immediately equates with the hidden objectives of white nationalism – in short, such people are identified simply as rank racists.

    So, to assure that these symbols of social injustice will disappear from our land, our politically correct factions outdo each other to demand removal of all such blatant displays of our despicable past.  Hence, we see statues of Confederate leaders and soldiers being toppled, and hear new cries to take down Civil War paintings in state houses and heroic facades from their exteriors.  And in the exercise of exquisite chutzpah, the Council on American-Islamic Relations joins in the demand that every Confederate memorial in the US be torn down.

    The reasonable underpinnings for these progressive and alt-left sentiments are hard to understand.  Where do we stop destroying and removing symbols of past ages that conflict with our revised and ever-changing cultural tenets; where do we stop blotting out reminders of the inconvenient eras that really happened; and with warts and all, that are still a part of our history?

    Do we follow the presumably sincere and heartfelt sentiments of ISIS and the Taliban who vandalize and destroy historical artifacts they consider hateful and even blasphemous to their God?  According to the tenets of their culture, such monuments and artifacts are an affront to the very foundation of our universe.  What about removing all evidence of the Roman Empire, a regime that conquered, ravaged, and enslaved so much of the world?  And was it not the Arabs in the first millennium who opened up the African slave trade along that continent’s east coast; do we also tear down the symbols of Arabic faith and glory?  And then throw in the Judeo-Christian scriptures and manifold artifacts abetting slavery.  To complete the job here in our foothills, hydraulic monitors were used in the Sierra to wash away entire mountain sides, polluting rivers and spoiling the livelihood of farmers in the valley below, all in the fevered search for gold.  Should we also remove these proudly-displayed symbols of exploitation and destruction erected in gold country towns that now memorialize that history?

    (more…)

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  • Scattershots – 15aug17 (updated 20aug17)

    “The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”  Will Rogers

    George Rebane

    In ‘By Whose Rockets’ Red Glare’ I doubted NK’s ability to do the engineering development and testing of the missiles they have been launching.  Now it looks like others are beginning to agree and find evidence of where those critical missile components came from.  I don’t feel alone anymore 😉  (more here and here)

    Senator Pocahontas Warren (D-MA) proclaimed proudly today that the Alt-Left has won and that her wing of the Democratic Party is no longer a wing, but today forms the “heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”  This has been visible for most of us for the last several years after Barack Obama won the presidency.  It now remains for the local grassroots idiots who have maintained the ideological constancy of their party to swallow hard and fess up.  All the movement that they have attributed to the Republicans moving right has been simple bullcrap.  The Republicans are still composed of independent thinkers who can’t come together sufficiently to repeal and replace Obamacare.  Such unanimity is not found among the goose-stepping Democrats.

    A ‘Charlottesville …’ commenter is puzzled about who in America are the ideological descendants of Stalin and Mao, and asks whether Democrat luminaries such as Comrades Bernie, Lizzie (aka Pocahontas), Nancy, Mad Max, … might be included in that group.  Let’s make the answer very clear – YES!  While they don’t yet dare put Marx/Engel’s Manifesto on the table and assemble to sing the Internationale – “the standard of the socialist movement since the 19th century” –  in tight four part harmony, they are doing the next best thing in their vigorous work to create an ever expanding leviathan that will answer the demands of the compliant mob voting in a pure democracy to sweep all dissent from their path.  You see, it’s got nothing to do with race or even anti-Semitism, for Marx, Engels, et al were lily white, and (along with the USSR’s ideological intellects) they were Jews.  But since the Left has never been able to openly debate their ideology, their perennial redoubt has been to simply accuse their opponents of being racists and anti-(fill in the blank), and then retire from the field.

    And here’s a significant quicksand trap that can catch the unwary today.  A leftwing mantra is that ‘Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.’  Now who again defines hate speech?  The debate on this is long-running and no less important now than it was 50 years ago.  Here are some thoughts from reason.com entitled ‘‘No Free Speech for Fascists’ Is a Truly Terrible Idea’.

    [17aug17 update]  Riskalyze hires new CFO.  I don’t say much about Riskalyze in these pages.  But longer time RR readers know a bit of my role with Riskalyze – we started the company in our dining room back in 2011.  In any event, the company continues to be the leader in its fintech sector, and has been growing like a weed.  Since Riskalyze is now regularly covered in the press, here’s more.  https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2017/08/17/auburn-based-fintech-company-recruits-cfo.html?

    [19aug17 update]  Ramirez again explains it to us.

    Ramirez_170819

    [20aug17 update]  The lamestream (e.g. CNN) accepts Southern Poverty Law Center’s expanded list of ‘hate groups’ (here is their “Hate Map”)  Today that list is expanding with the names of conservative organizations that range from simply being conservative to those who also publish events in the expansion of Islam in the west.  Included in their hate list are “Christian Identity” groups and any group that is critical of the government.  The schism continues to deepen, while the most on the Left diminish this division by still referring to the now expanded groups as being ‘fringe elements’.  More and more it turns out that Senator Pocahontas’ claims about the new Alt-Left ideological center of the Democratic Party appear to be true.  I wonder what is the largest fraction of a population that can still be labeled as being on its fringe.  (more here and here)

    On this matter Rush Limbaugh noted that “black people and white people who were never slaves are fighting white people and others who were never Nazis over Confederate statues erected by Democrats,” and added that “somehow it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”

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  • Sandbox – 13aug17

    [New sandbox for all topics save the Charlottesville/Google controversies for which your fine thoughts and other improvisations should be posted under 'Charlottesville – harbinger or just a temperature reading?'  gjr]

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  • Charlottesville – harbinger or just a temperature reading? [updated 14aug17]

    George Rebane

    [This post invites the continuation of the lively comment thread on the expression/suppression of ideas that started in the 10aug17 Sandbox.]

    So what happened yesterday in Charlottesville?  We know that a coalition of white supremacists got a permit to demonstrate against the relocation of a Confederate statue, and that leftwing counter demonstrators showed up to protest the protest.  Violence ensued – instigation unknown, results tragic.  Megaphones from all sides have now blared into action.  From the Left and lamestream, the answer to all questions is again unimaginably simple – it was once more the fault of the ‘rightwing racists’ who were egged on by Trump.

    And the remedy for it all is even simpler – use government force to deny those deemed racist, nationalist, etc the right to demonstrate in public forums.  Even such good Christians such as Dean Ashford at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (here) and rightwing national commentator Erick Erickson (here) promote such a response to outlier thought and speech.

    Before any left-leaning readers get their undies in a bundle, let’s first dispose of the race issue – RR, nor any of its readers to my knowledge, espouse the notion that one race or another is superior.  Counter arguments to this – such as ‘yes, but we know what you really think’ – have been made by leftwingers with bankrupt debating skills, and, no doubt, will be made by them again.  However, RR has strongly argued that cultures are not only different, but also of varying nature as to the quality of life they have provided and continue to provide for their adherents.

    As stated here many times – I am a child, student, and defender of Western culture.  Western culture is not static, and has benefited greatly through its liberal mien, over the years by adopting ‘best practices’ from other cultures with which it has come into contact.  And I also believe that people all over the world, who have adopted major tenets of western culture, to that extent they have benefited and enriched their lives.  But today Western culture is suffering a purposed collapse, and the reactionary white supremacists are abetting this downward spiral.  Erickson’s wider appraisal is here germane –

    The regressive ideas of the white supremacists in Charlottesville have no place in America any more than the censorious totalitarianism on display last week at Google. They are all from the same strain of secular uncertainty rising as Western cultural certainties collapse.

    But to be productive, these debates/discussions should attempt to achieve a common understanding of what ideas can be professed, and by whom in public forums (which include the online media) and in the workplace.  To me the First Amendment prohibits the suppression of free speech, especially ‘speech’ deemed unpopular, by the government AND by citizens who are offended by such speech – that is simply the cost of doing the business of maintaining our American republic.

    It is through the open competition of ideas that western culture flowered and continues to increase our enlightenment, and the enlightenment of all societies.  And it is through the suppression of peaceful competition of all kinds – including in the arena of ideas – that will sound the death knell of western culture.  (more later)

    [update] Well, this little missive has drawn a bit of ire from our neighbors on our left.  I received an email quoting one of their leading intellectual lights demonstrating his knowledge of American history by taking to task the content of my opening paragraphs.   Thereof he claims that I have written “a bunch of alt-right revisionist, great divide driving, bastardization of American history.”  Fortunately, for the sake of expediency, the depth of his reasoning is both flawed and shallow.  Starting with the name of the 1860-65 conflict, the man has little knowledge of the century plus debate in the learned circles of our academe about the true nature of what the various factions of the South and North sought to achieve.  Here is a reference from Wikipedia citing the legion of authors who have discussed and debated the affair.  Given his age and many responsibilities, I really don’t know how to advise the man about remediating his education, especially concerning his views about the bastardization of American history.

    [14aug17 update]  ‘Why were the police held back in Chalottesville?’ is being asked by people concerned about the conduct of the authorities during last weekend’s demonstrations.  Actually, there is a large faction in the country that is not asking, does not want to know, and/or already knows.  The answer to the question is not all that hard to puzzle out – just think about who benefitted from the police being ordered to stand down to let the counter demonstrators confront the white nationalist demonstrators.  When this Virginia town’s response is compared to what has happened in other towns like Berkeley, it is clear that Democrat authorities are now basing their use of police intervention on first satisfying their political agendas.  Strongly invite evidence to the contrary.

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  • Our ERC gets dunned, again

    George Rebane

    The 9aug17 Union’s lead story was ‘Supes question ERC head’.  Our local business development agency – renamed Economic Resource Council to assuage the progressive palates – has had a sad history of under achievement, not all of which can be laid at its feet.  More than once the county’s sop for inducing economic progress has bitten off not only more than it could chew, but projects totally ‘inedible’ by a Nevada County in its recent political mindset.  The most recent ballyhooed Green Screen Institute for incubating local virtual and augmented reality enterprises is a good example, and one that continues to underline ERC’s reputation as a non-performing institution in our community.

    What the ERC has never, to my knowledge, addressed are the factors and local attributes needed for an inviting environment in which to start/build for-profit developments and businesses.  To a capitalist entrepreneur, no matter how socially conscious, the county is as inviting as a slow-dance with a porcupine.  The local governments and agencies combine to interpret and enforce higher-up laws and regulations in the most strict and rigid manner that modern bureaucracies have devised.  And then our local leadership goes a step beyond in demonstrating to all its progressive propensities by adding on draconian local strictures to top off the already formidable battlements erected against businesses in California.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 10aug17

    [Apologies for the delay in providing fresh sand.  It is interesting to continue the discussion of the Fat Kid's threats in response to which our Left wants to go through the next cycle of appeasement, so that when another 5-7 years have gone by NK really has the capability to concurrently launch multiple missiles with survivable warheads.  The people counseling a diplomatic solution to the current 'crisis' are firing intellectual blanks – they propose nothing new and fully succumb to Einsteinian Stupidity by repeating the same thing while expecting different results.  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 7aug17 (updated 9aug17)

    George Rebane

    A most puzzling question – why is Putin acting as if Russia’s chances for achieving its national interests under the present US-led world order are worse than under an unknown world order that will arise when/if Putin, Islam, and the American Left successfully upsets US leadership?

    Absent any believable and propitious policy initiatives from the Democrats, the Left is reduced to its historical MO of pandering to people who don’t have the intellectual tools to understand or evaluate what they are told.  The current diversionary full-court press in the lamestream media appears to be a political redoubt into which they have retreated, to then do what??  Emerge with some new killer program of initiatives that will sweep all opposition from the public mind?  Or just hunker down and continue lobbing politically correct ‘bombshells’, hoping one of them will finally derail Team Trump, or in the interval see the Republicans splinter and eat their own?

    Look for Google to go into corporatist hyper-drive in the coming years.  The left-leaning company has now become so politically correct with its internal policies – especially with regard to race, gender, and ideology – and office milieu that an unnamed male software engineer has written an extended sober critique of the situation for his colleagues which has gone viral (here)  The Left, of course, is outraged and its newly hired VP of Diversity discombobulated by the unauthorized and freewheeling discussions/debate the memo has launched.  And here is a better measure of the depth of this disease; this is the response from one of the software engineer’s bosses who “wrote the memo ‘troubled me deeply’ because it suggested ‘most women, or men, feel or act a certain way. That is stereotyping, and it is harmful.’” (yes; you really can’t make this up)

    But what it all reveals about Google is most interesting.  When companies manage to achieve this stage of entangled undies, their competitive performance inevitably suffers and future fortunes must be bought and paid for through and to appropriate government contacts.  It was ever thus.

    [8aug17 update]  Well I’ll be a sumbich, Google fired Mr James Damore, the software engineer who wrote the memo.  And the reason?  Wrongthink.  Yes, boys and girls, our society has now undeniably arrived on the outskirts of the Orwellian world in which you can be proscribed and punished for revealing that you are thinking ‘wrong thoughts’.  (more here)

    But here’s the important point yet to be raised in the debate on this action by one of the world’s largest and most influential corporations.  If a private corporation restricts its employee policy to work related functions that support its commercial objectives, then one can argue that employees should restrict their workplace behaviors to the business at hand, and not use the work hours and venue to proselytize their thoughts on other topics.  However, if the corporation itself addends to its employee policy and proselytizes in the workplace such things as ideology-driven social engineering desiderata, then it should be the commensurate ‘right’ of every employee to express their own ideas about said desiderata in the workplace.  And if that means pushing back on the corporation’s extra-commercial messaging, then so be it, the corporation has no grounds for dunning the employee for equally sharing their thoughts as long as such activity does not subtract from the employee’s productivity.  After all, the purpose of the corporation was to make a profit selling its goods/services, and not to act as an adjunct ideological re-education center for its workers.  (The 8aug17 WSJ dances around this topic here, but doesn’t quite connect the dots.)

    However, that clearly is not the case today where diversity VPs also wear the hat of corporate thought police, and can severely punish workers who dare voice opinions and ideas that are counter to the corporation’s politically correct lines of thought.  Welcome to the early onset of 2084.

    [9aug17 update]  More on the joys of Obamacare, Rasmussen reports that 6.5 million Americans paid their fine rather than sign up for that latest progressive-promoted paragon of social engineering – a fact studiously ignored by the lamestream and leftwingers everywhere. (more here)

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  • Megaphones and Reporters – what’s the difference?

    George Rebane

    Regarding the national controversy on leaks and leaking, let’s consider the roles of megaphones and media reporters.  We understand that a ‘leak’ today is considered as the release of confidential information that is not intended to be widely distributed among the public.  A leak requires the participation of at least two functioning ‘agents’ – 1) a person (the Leaker) who decides to divulge information in an unauthorized manner and does so to a third party, and 2) the agent (the Broker) providing the functional means of distributing the information to an audience so as to serve the agenda of the Leaker.

    The Leaker’s actions may or not be illegal and therefore criminal.  (If it is illegal to transmit the confidential information to an unauthorized recipient, the Leaker becomes a criminal the moment he gives the information to the Broker, regardless of whether the Broker knows the provenance of the information he receives.)  The Broker is usually a media reporter who works for an outlet through which he will distribute the leaked information to an audience intended by the Leaker.

    Today’s controversy involves the status and role of the Broker as a member of our Fourth Estate, namely the press.  Liberal societies perfunctorily hold the role and function of the press to be sacrosanct, since it is thought that it is an unfettered press which keeps ‘the people’ informed of things important to their well being, information that would otherwise be held from them to their ultimate detriment.

    However, the role of the Broker becomes controversial when the leaked information is deemed confidential to the level that it affects the security and relations of sovereign nation-states, and the internal operations of their governments.  Specifically, does the Broker bear any responsibility for distributing any information he may receive from a Leaker?  Or since if the Broker violated no law or explicit stricture of confidentiality, is he free to broadcast the leaked information without further thought or consideration?

    Journalism

    To help answer this important question, consider two scenarios.  In the first, the Leaker contacts the Broker, transmits the information, and sits back to enjoy the Broker fulfill his function of dissemination.  In the second, the Leaker picks up a megaphone (or in the modern era a radio transmitter or an anonymous web post or its many functional equivalents) and, bypassing the Broker, simply disseminates the confidential information himself.  We then reformulate the question – does the human Broker have any more responsibility in being part and party to a leak than does a megaphone?

    The national debate today does not seem to appreciate this important perspective of what is a leak.  For most certainly, if the Leaker gave his information to the Broker who then decided not to further disseminate it, but to simply hold it confidential in perpetuity, there would be no leak.  I have not seen any reporter or pundit able to penetrate this simple analysis of the existential components of a leak, and the further ramifications it would raise regarding the responsibilities of an involved Broker/reporter.  But to be absolutely frank, I tend to think that a reporter – no matter the low regard that that profession commands in our land – should still be held to a higher standard than a plastic megaphone.  

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  • The Return of Featherbedding (updated 5aug17)

    George Rebane

    When George Westinghouse patented his railway ‘fail-safe’ airbrakes in 1869, that new technology inaugurated a century of what came to be called featherbedding for the railroad industry as unions successfully fought the railroads to continue employing unneeded workers.  Prior to airbrakes on each railroad car, the speed of trains on down grades were controlled by brakemen manually setting each car’s brakes and then releasing them.  This was demonstrably the most dangerous job on a train since it required the brakemen to run up and down the length of the moving train equipped with narrow wooden gangways on the roofs of freight cars, jumping from car to car night and day in all kinds of weather.  Thousands of brakemen died during the 1800s until all trains were equipped with the Westinghouse brakes.  Today we still have railroad ‘brakemen’ doing other things, but that’s another story.   (more here) 

    The important notion to understand here is that after remotely operated airbrakes were installed, railroads were still forced to hire brakemen whose new make-work tasks allowed them to also while away their work hours ‘featherbedding’ in the obligatory caboose (crew’s sleeping quarters) at the end of each train.  Due to successful lobbying of the federal and various state legislatures by the unions, laws were passed to enforce specified crew sizes and compositions, and, of course, union memberships.  This continues to this day.

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 2aug17

    [I had no idea that the discussion of Trump’s presidency and its survival could be elevated to the enviable level of an unending ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, ‘Yes he is …’, ‘No he isn’t …’, without any perceptible loss of interest by the discussants.  Nevertheless, on the off chance that someone wants to introduce a new topic thread, here’s some fresh sand.  However, any such forays into new issues are not required, especially for those convinced that other readers are hanging on every clever word in their repartees 😉  gjr]

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175 comments on Add to history, and not take from it (updated 17aug17)